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Joseph Stalin was born 18th December 1878 and died on 5th March 1953, was the leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Holding the post of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he was effectively the dictator of the state. Stalin was born in Gori in the Tiflis Governorate of the Russian Empire, to Besarion Jughashvili, a Georgian cobbler who owned his own workshop, and Ketevan Geladze, a Georgian who was born a serf. He was the youngest of their three boys; their two previous sons died in infancy.
Stalin's chief aim was to expand industrial production. For this, he developed three Five-year Plans between 1928 and 1938. Gosplan, the state planning agency, …show more content…

One might offer a number of reasons for this: Stalin's own anti-Semitism might have made him sympathetic to the Nazis; perhaps he felt an affinity for Hitler as a fellow dictator; he might have seen the stridently anti-bourgeois Nazis as being closer to Marxism than the decadent capitalist Allies. But the simplest explanation is that Stalin, who did not desire war (indeed, he feared it) was indulging in wishful thinking wishful thinking that no one, in the fear-laced atmosphere of the Soviet Union, dared to question.
In 1945, the Allies decided to split Germany into four zones of occupation. The capital, Berlin, was also split into four zones. The USSR took huge reparations from its zone in eastern Germany, but Britain, France and America tried to improve conditions in their zones. In June 1948, Britain, France and America united their zones into a new country, West Germany. On 23 June 1948, they introduced a new currency, which they said would help trade. The next day, Stalin cut off all rail and road links to West Berlin - the Berlin Blockade. The west saw this as an attempt to starve Berlin into surrender, so they decided to supply West Berlin by air. The Berlin Blockade lasted 318 days. During this time, 275,000 planes transported 1.5 million tons of supplies and a plane landed

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